The Real Humanities Crisis

Gary Gutting is a professor of philosophy at the University of Notre Dame, and an editor of Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews.
He is the author of, most recently, “Thinking the Impossible: French
Philosophy since 1960,” and writes regularly for The Stone.

“Crisis” and “decline”
are the words of the day in discussions of the humanities. A primary
stimulus for the concern is a startling factoid: only 8 percent of
undergraduates major in humanities. But this figure is misleading. It
does not include majors in closely related fields such as history,
journalism and some of the social sciences. Nor does it take account of
the many required and elective humanities courses students take outside
their majors. Most important, the 8 percent includes only those with a
serious academic interest in literature, music and art, not those
devoted to producing the artistic works that humanists study.

Once we recognize that deeply caring about the humanities (including
the arts) does not require majoring in philosophy, English or foreign
languages, it’s not at all obvious that there is a crisis of interest in
the humanities, at least in our universities.

Is the crisis rather one of harsh economic reality? Humanities majors
on average start earning $31,000 per year and move to an average of
$50,000 in their middle years. (The figures for writers and performing
artists are much lower.) By contrast, business majors start with
salaries 26 percent higher than humanities majors and move to salaries
51 percent higher.

But this data does not show that business majors earn more because
they majored in business. Business majors may well be more interested in
earning money and so accept jobs that pay well even if they are not
otherwise fulfilling, whereas people interested in the humanities and
the arts may be willing to take more fulfilling but lower-paying jobs.
College professors, for example, often know that they could have made
far more if they had gone to law school or gotten an M.B.A., but are
willing to accept significantly lower pay to teach a subject they love....